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Mobility preferences driving consumption, development

The California HealthCare Foundation released "How Smartphones Are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers" prepared by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, M.A., M.H.S.A. Sarasohn-Kahn reviewed the demographics of mobile internet users, reviewed smartphone applications for clinicians and consumers, medical reference tools, continuing medical education, EHRs and PHRs, patient and health consumer support. She then recited barriers to adoption and some insights from early adoption.

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Google’s Eric Schmidt spoke to the American Society of News Editors telling them that they have a business model problem because they need to think internet first–and by that he meant "mobile first". He characterized the Internet as mobile devices connected to supercomputers (web servers) and offered that the cleverest engineers were now creating mobile solutions rather than those for the personal computer desktops. He explained that the mobile web is being adopted 8 times faster than the equivalent point in the regular Internet. He added that half of all new Internet connections are coming from mobile devices of one kind or another, and that one out of three read their news on their phone (literally). He argued that the preferences for Android, Kindle and iPad will be the future form factor determinant for newsrooms. Each platform has had experiments in news consumption designed specifically for them, he relayed.

The next version of the newsreader, Schmidt suggested, would be personalized in a manner newspapers have never seen before and will be aware of what news items have already been read and won’t display topics redundantly (he noted earlier that only 20% of news has any discrete and meaningfully new information). Mobile news will be more interactive, will have a greater number of sources (in the newsroom sense), more video, more real-time. It will be more integrative of all news sources (in the feed sense) combined with the freedom to tweet.

Note: The ASNE Twitter feed delivered these stats: American daily newspapers lost another 5,200 jobs last year bringing the total loss of journalists since 2007 to 13,500. But American daily newspapers lost fewer staffers than in 2008, when nearly 6,000 journalists left newsrooms across the country. The percentage of minorities in newsrooms totaled 13.26 percent, a decline of .15 percentage points from a year ago.